English Majors File Lawsuit Against UT Citing Hostile Environment #satire

Last updated on: August 28, 2015 at 2:59 pm by Jennifer Fitz

English Majors File Lawsuit Against UT Citing Hostile Environment #satire 2015-08-28T14:59:30-05:00 Jennifer Fitz

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KNOXVILLE – Outside of the University of Tennessee’s student center, demonstrators have gathered to stand in solidarity with a minority group facing a hostile reception from school administrators: English majors. Sophmore Laura Branson takes the megaphone and leads protesters in chanting, “A Loving Pronoun NEEDN’T / Disagree With Its ANTECEDENT!”

Senior Tom Jackson holds a sign saying No Time for Panic We’ll Defeat the Lexiphanic! while he explains, “This is about inclusion. This is about genuine diversity. The administration has taken to officially encouraging students to use a plural pronoun in place of a singular noun, an overt act of hostility towards students of letters.”

“What they didn’t bargain for,” a classics major who declines to be named adds, “is that some of us in the liberal arts really do go on to law school. We’re not all working in coffee shops — that’s a stereotype. Though I do. But I like coffee, so it’s okay.”

The students are filing a discrimination suit on the grounds that UT’s diversity program is singling out “persons of the Standard English cultural background” and “creating an overtly hostile environment, in which those students are shamed for insisting on their native use of pronouns that agree in number.”

“People think this is about gender,” Branson says when she takes a break from leading protest chants, “but it’s not. It’s about singular versus plural. You simply can’t use ‘they’ ‘them’ and ‘their’ to refer to a single person and not be engaging in an act of aggression against the grammar-knowledgeable people groups of the university.”

Asked whether the protesters are also upset about the suggested pronouns ze and xe, both pronounced “zhee,” Jackson shrugs and says, “Nah, those are used around fraternity housing all the time. Usually after midnight, when the third or fourth keg has been tapped. So there’s longstanding precedent in the dialect — orally, anyhow. Though I suspect the administration is not fully informed about the connotations of the usage among the Greek peoples. But that’s their little linguistic problem, not mine.”

As protesters are gearing up to resume chanting, Branson clenches the arm of the unnamed classics student and whispers, “Remember what we discussed in the strategy meeting. Under no circumstances are you to talk to the press about collective nouns.”

Photo: Britons Learn Turkish – Adult Education in London, 1943 by Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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